The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

This Saturday night, as part of the New York Film Critics Circle series devoted to films released in 1962, BAM will screen John Ford’s Western “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” which I discuss in the video below. There’s much to say about it; the simplest is that it’s both the most romantic of Westerns and the greatest American political movie.

The Western is intrinsically the most political movie genre, because, like Plato’s “Republic,” it is concerned with the founding of cities, and because it depicts the various abstract functions of government as direct, physical actions. It’s also an inherently romantic genre, because of its connection with the nation’s founding mythology. (One of the strengths of Ford’s movie is its depiction of the actual grassroots practical politicking in the Western territories.) The movie’s most famous line, of course, is that of a newspaperman: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Ford prints it—and prints the facts behind it—and makes a movie about the moral burden of a life lived in the name of a myth and the ethical implications of direct action. Implicitly, the subject of the film is also that of a nation founded in this way. In his next Western, “Cheyenne Autumn,” from 1964, Ford takes on another overlooked Western reality: that of the Native Americans and their relations with the United States government.

But the movie is also romantic in another, intimate way—it’s a great love story and a painful triangle, involving the tenderfoot lawyer (James Stewart), his gunslinger friend (John Wayne), and the woman they both love (Vera Miles). The tale’s epic span—it’s framed as a flashback to distant youth—stretches that love story over a vast arc of experience and renders it immeasurably poignant. As it draws to a close, there’s hardly a dry eye in the house—at least, in our house.

Sign up to get the best of The New Yorker delivered to your inbox every day